


Art for Space Cowboy

by whichstiel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Art post, Cowboys, M/M, Outer Space, Spaceships, papercutting art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-03 19:43:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21184946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: Art post for Speary's 2019 DCBB story, Space Cowboy





	Art for Space Cowboy

What do space, astronauts, cowboys, and the southwestern US have in common? They are all one billion percent MY JAM. I was thrilled to claim [Speary's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Speary/pseuds/Speary) story, [_Space Cowboy_,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260150/chapters/50619710) for this year's DCBB. Her story is an action-packed adventure with lots of favorite side characters and a wonderful portrayal of Cas and Dean. Here's the summary:

>   
A portal showed up near the space station Calliope, signaling the beginning of an adventure that would span worlds. When Sam and Dean Winchester’s spaceship, the _Impala_, is pulled through the portal, seemingly disappearing forever, it becomes the mission of one risk-taking Commander Castiel Novak to find the Winchesters and their ship, fight Leviathans, and bring them home.

[Read it on AO3!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260150/chapters/50619710)

As soon as I read the art claim summary, I knew I wanted to do bright, almost cartoonish paper art for this project. The first challenge was to design a spaceship that might evoke the Impala. My author suggested the SpaceX rocket as a model. Using that as a base, I sketched out some potential ideas for Baby-as-spaceship.

Designing the cover is often my first step to set a tone for the pieces. I knew I wanted to have an astronaut and cowboy on the cover, so that was the first thing I designed. I took several pictures, but the ones that worked best were taken in bright sunlight. The days are getting pretty short here, so probably one of the most difficult scheduling tasks with this art was finding time to photograph when it was actually sunny so I could capture the richest color and sharpest shadows.

I tried to use the same cartoonish technique for the next scene - the rift in space. But it really didn't work out very well. I'd seen some examples of paper art (or maybe faux-paper-actually-digital art) which showed lovely cartoonish layers of space. That...really didn't work out for me so well. It was confusing...am I looking at a planet? Did I make a mistake?

I ended up scrapping the background, keeping the Impala and the space station. I looked up YouTube videos on how to paint galaxy patterns and one night I got out my paints and some leftover black cardstock and gave it a try. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! (Although the art critic in me complains that I didn't use painting in any of the other pieces, so how does it match?)

The main space/rift setup is set on top of a frame and there's a flashlight underneath to add a little extra strip of light to the barely-there planet. This was photographed in sunshine, which produced the least amount of glare on the somewhat glossy paint and gave me truer colors of the paper pieces.

The next scene I tackled was the campfire kiss. I'm a huge sucker for a silhouette picture, so this was a fun one to do. The top silhouette is taped to the top of a shadowbox frame and I've got a couple of lights shining underneath to illuminate the sky. I tried several shots of this picture in sunshine, but it made everything too bright and washed out the silhouette. I found I got the best silhouette by taking the picture inside on a bright sunny day. The indirect light helped with the camera focus, and the flashlights underneath illuminated only what I wanted to show.

I've been trying to work smaller lately because I love little bitty artworks. This next one was an attempt to make a small image and convey a scene using minimal lines. I loved the idea of an airship settling in a valley in the middle of the mountains. This was a fun, colorful project to work on during an otherwise very rainy weekend afternoon.

The last piece, the divider, is the Impala, of course! I know saguaro cacti aren't native to southern Utah, which is the terrain Speary modeled Mars after, but I've always loved the look of them. They're such iconic desert plants. They're also the only recognizable cactus that can grow as high as a spaceship!

This was a great project to try some new things and play with color a little bit. Speary was wonderful to work with and her story is so much fun! [Give it a read today](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260150/chapters/50619710) :)


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